


on the off-chance i could find you

by sarsaparillia



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, past Sasuke/Kin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-06
Updated: 2012-06-05
Packaged: 2017-11-07 00:43:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/425040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarsaparillia/pseuds/sarsaparillia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a disposable plastic society, Konoha's underbelly is the last place anyone wants to be. — Sasuke/Sakura.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. sing me back to sleep

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Sakura woke to the hollow patter of rain against glass.

The sky outside was still the dull shade of purple-black that only descended upon the city in the deepest depths of night. Konoha never slept, but 3AM on a Tuesday was about as close to slow as the monster-city ever got. Damp with the deluge of water from the sky, it was even quieter than normal.

It was the quiet that had woken her, anyway. She slept to the lullaby-rumble of skytrains and wailing sirens, and anything else made her uncomfortable.

Sakura stumbled out of bed, rubbing at her eyes. Golden effulgence shone from underneath her closed door and she pushed the door open to tumble into the kitchen light.

The brilliance of it nearly blinded her. It took Sakura's eyes a full minute to adjust.

She rubbed at tired green eyes again. "What time is it?"

"Early," came the reply.

Her only cousin sat at their little table in their dingy little kitchen, palms curled around a steaming cup of coffee and a piece of cold, leftover piece of pizza on a grease-soaked paper plate in front of her. She was decked in her finest regalia; polish on the nails and lips redder than blood, oversize shirt cinched tight at the waist, glittery heels and ripped tights.

Karin looked like she'd been out on the town, but Sakura didn't want to know the specifics.

"You look slutty," Sakura said.

(No specifics, _sure_. Or she just really needed to learn to control her mouth.)

Karin only grinned, red hair in her eyes. "I always look slutty. It's my job, remember?"

Sakura rolled her eyes towards the low ceiling. Her gaze lingered there on the aged grey stucco and the brown water damage in the corners, head tipped back, eyes slit to almost closed. "I guess so. Is there any coffee left?"

"Mmhmm, in the pot on the burner. Should still be hot," Kari murmured into her cup.

Sakura shuffled to the counter, rubbing at her arms. The heat had gone out again. She shouldn't have been surprised, not really. The inner city all worked on one power grid, tangled up and stretched out through lines that shot off up to the curve of the skydome where the thieves and the rushes and the forgotten fed off the dregs of left-over power.

It wasn't unheard of for the heat to go out.

"God, it's cold."

The coffee steamed as Sakura poured herself a mug. Thick as sludge and dark, but that was the way Karin always brewed coffee—mostly no one else could stomach it. She'd gotten used to it in the months they'd lived together.

"You better drink that shit and get going. You're gonna be late."

Sakura looked up, eyes suddenly wide. "But you said it was early—"

"Early for _me_ ," Karin clarified. "Late for _you_. It's almost four."

"I _start_ at four! Why didn't you _tell_ me _?_!"

Karin sat back, legs crossed and placid, and grinned wickedly behind the chipped safety of her mug. "Because you always get like this, and it's amusing.."

"I really hate you, sometimes, Karin." Sakura let out a seething sound that was a cross between a whisper and a scream; furious, but determined not to wake the rest of the building. She rushed back into her bedroom, flicked the light on—nearly blinded herself in the process, fuck it—already searching for her work scrubs.

"I gotta run. You owe me takeout," Sakura told her as she skid back into the kitchen to chug the sludge-coffee and try to tie her hair back with one hand.

"Yeah, yeah," Karin chuckled. "Have a good day, dear!"

"I'm not kidding, you owe me!" Sakura called over her shoulder. As an afterthought, she stole the last piece of pizza on her way out.

Karin's screeching followed her all the way down the fire escape.

Sakura hit the ground laughing, pulling her hood up to spite the rain. The world still stunk of Konoha's nightlife, but finally on the comedown because 4AM was when the city drowned into the brilliant depression of vodka and the slow drip of burnt gasoline into the gutters. When the rain dampened it all down, sank into the ground, and cleaned Konoha from the inside out.

And this was her time, in the aftershock of ecstasy and freedom; that time when the night went silent—not, of course, that Konoha ever really went silent. But it was in the something-close-to-rest that Sakura found herself, trudging towards the solid cement walls of the children's hospital where she worked, bleeding herself to empty and exhaustion.

The hallways were long in that place, stark and fluorescent, but Sakura liked it. There was something clean in the sterility.

It was a place where children went to get better.

(Not that they always did. Sakura thought of Ami with leukemia and Takashi with poisoned blood and Ryuji gone blind with the cancer in his eyes and—and forced herself not to cry.)

The rain swept the city to almost clean.

Sakura breathed in deep.

The sun wouldn't rise for another few hours. She needed to be at work in… thirty seconds, give or take. Well, she wasn't going to be doing herself any favours if she didn't hurry.

Illness waited for no one, especially in the darkest, dankest depths of Konoha's festering streets. She had children to attend to.

She couldn't just let them die.

And with that, Sakura ducked underneath the thin metal overhang, and slipped into the hospital.

—

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 _tbc_.


	2. perspective is a lovely hand to hold

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The hustle of the nurse's staff room was the same as always. Sakura stuffed her bag into her locker, slammed the thing closed, and hurried to find her supervisor.

Shizune smiled at her, weary in the eyes. "You look tired."

"If you mean I look like shit, then yeah," Sakura sighed. "I know."

Shizune touched her shoulder, thin skin over fragile bones, offering something that might have been comfort or maybe just the knowledge that she wasn't alone. Sakura took it and ran, already trapped in the hospitals lights, shivering with loss. Comfort wasn't something easily offered.

Not here.

Not now.

Sakura grabbed her timesheet with a grin, and went to deal with her patients.

The ICU was quiet. Sakura walked the white halls, feet skimming across the tiled floor in an attempt to make herself quiet. Small. Most of the children would still be asleep, and peeking into their rooms confirmed her suspicions—Sawada-san slumbered in her usual chair next to her son, and Hino-san waved at her wearily while his little girl slept soundly hooked up to an IV drip. All her usual charges were quiet.

That was good.

Sakura nearly sighed in relief.

(It was always hard to see the little ones in pain.)

There was an extra name scribbled at the bottom of the list that Sakura hadn't seen before—room 2021, Uchiha Midori. She tipped her head, squinted. Uchiha. _Uchiha_. It tasted familiar on her tongue, but she couldn't place it.

She sighed, brushed her bangs out of her eyes, and ascended the stairs.

Long hallways gave her time to prepare herself for whatever it was that was in the room; and she'd seen sick things, so many sick things. She'd seen so many people who were about to die.

Sakura breathed in and out, and carefully slid the door to room 2021 open.

The lights were dim. Sakura stood in the threshold.

There was a man sitting by the bedside, looking about as dapper as a morgue; he was all dark hair, dark eyes, three-piece designer suit that couldn't be comfortable at all. Too still, too quiet, too pale; the little girl in the bed in the bed was the same.

The world felt leached of colour. Sakura had seen death before; it was written all over this tiny little slip of a girl, digging its fingers into the cracks and the seams in her posture. She didn't know how long she stood in the doorway, staring at the pair of them. The little girl's struggle for breath was a sucking sound, slick and wet against the sterile tranquility of the hospital room.

She wanted to say so many things.

She was trained in the art of comfort, but from the stillness in the man's face, she knew they would not be appreciated.

But still, there were some things that needed to be said.

"Uchiha-san?"

He didn't even twitch. His lips barely moved. Barely breathed. "Yes."

"Midori is your daughter, then."

"Yes," and he closed his eyes.

Sakura wondered quietly if grief looked the same on all people. The eyes were the same, she thought, gone hollow like they couldn't quite take what was going on around them.

"Alright, sir. I need to ask you about your family history—"

"No. Nothing."

Sakura frowned. "Are you sure?"

"Of course," and there was an edge of nasty disdain in his voice.

"Alright. I'll just take her blood pressure and—"

"What do you think you can do? You're just a nurse," he said, face blank. But there was something there, something cruel and cold like he was _brushing her off_ ; like she hadn't taken a full course loud, winter and summer, for three years to get here. Like she didn't mean anything—like she was _just another nurse who didn't know what she was talking about_.

So that was the way he wanted to play, then, was it?

Sakura smiled. It was a vicious harsh thing, pulling up in the creases; not kind. " _Just a nurse_? Please. I know your type. _Don't_ pull that bullshit holier-than-thou-enigmatic-dark-prince routine with me, Uchiha. I've seen things that would make your high-bred dickbag hair _curl_ , okay? I've seen things that would have you seized up, plastic wrapped, and priced for goddamn sale. I've seen things that would make you sick to your stomach. I've seen things that would blow you clear out of the _water_."

She paused to breathe, clearly incensed.

But he couldn't know about the things she'd seen. He couldn't know that at night, Konoha's alleyways still ran with blood—and always all the wrong types of blood. He couldn't know that she'd gone to school with no less than three separate murderers, and he couldn't know that she'd slept only one in three nights, too busy studying to keep her scholarship to sleep.

He couldn't know any of those things, but Sakura couldn't forgive him his utter contempt for her hard work.

She pulled a deep breath in, and continued, voice kept low to avoid waking the little girl. "And I'm doing this for your daughter, not for you. We clear?"

(Sometimes she thought that maybe Karin was rubbing off on her. _There_ was a scary thought. She resolved not to think of it too much anymore.)

He stared at her, empty-eyed and fathomless in the dim incandescent light from the ceiling. Sakura's stomach churned, acid pushing its way up into her throat. That had been mean. She didn't have to be that mean.

But mean was easy.

Hurting was easy.

There was something cold about hurting someone else. It ate away at a person until she became just this bare bleached skeleton that smiled with her lips pulled back over her teeth and all she could do was _hurt_.

Sakura was well-versed in the art of war.

Sakura was well-versed in the art of _hurt_.

(Anyone who'd grown up on Konoha's north end was well-versed in the art of _hurt_. Wrong side of the tracks, and all that—only there were no tracks in Konoha, because the earth-bound trains had stopped running with the completion of the skytrain. She'd watched the tracks rust under the rain, the gravel cupping pools of acidic rain to reflect the blue above them, and she understood. Who would want to touch the ground when they could race across the sky?)

She crossed her arms, clipboard in hand, and returned his stare.

She didn't have to be mean, but she'd learned a long time ago that if she didn't put spoiled rich kids in their place, they ended up thinking they could walk all over her. And Sakura had worked, worked long and hard, to make that an impossibility.

There was no room for snark in her life.

(Only tears.)

"Clear," he said.

"Good," Sakura replied.

She'd been expecting more resistance than that. He struck her as the type that would have fits if things weren't done to his standard.

But the lines around his eyes were deep and haunted. He sat with hands clasped, tense and white around the knuckles, like he'd clenched the wheel of a car for too many hours and didn't quite remember how to loosen his muscles. Sakura reached down and carefully detangled his fingers.

"Your daughter is going to be alright."

She didn't promise, though, because promises always backfired.

She'd learned that.

She'd learned that so well.

And she smiled down at the man, he who looked so tired and so hurt, and meant it this time. This time her smile was kind. Warm. Meant to heal.

"I'm Haruno Sakura. Call if you need help, okay?"

He nodded at her once.

Sakura bowed her head, and quietly left the room.

—

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 _tbc_.


	3. listen to the sirens

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Once in a while, Sakura thought that everyone should lose their minds.

But now wasn't the time.

Now was the time for soft lullabies to dying girls, and whispered stories, and promises that everyone knew where false. But comfort was the only thing that children understood, and when they cried through the night, Sakura did the only thing she knew how to do. Comforting children had never been part of the job description, but she was good at it, and the other nurses seemed to find relief in it.

She slid through the halls in a kind of stupor, wandering in the way of ghosts, a cadenza in cerulean scrubs. No one said a word, and let her do her rounds.

She collapsed in the staff room three hours later, exhausted. Sakura dropped her head into her hands and rested her eyes.

"Want some coffee?"

A gentle hand on her shoulder had Sakura glancing up, and the first glimpse of long dark hair, pale eyes, and a kind smile cheered her immensely. Hyuuga Hinata held a cup of steaming coffee under her nose, and though it was thin, it was welcomed.

"Thanks," Sakura soughed. It escaped her and withered into the air much as the steam was, and she was so tired.

"New patient?" Hinata asked, because that was the only thing that could have caused that sort of exhaustion in Sakura's normally indomitable cheer.

"Yeah," she murmured, and dropped her head to the table. "I went off on him, too."

"On the patient?"

"No, her guardian—father, I think? I don't know. He was there. I…"

"Went off," Hinata repeated. Her face was neutral, gentle-eyed, and Sakura knew how much work it had taken her to deal with the stutter, to not allow it to control her—Sakura remembered how long it had taken them to become friends.

Her fingers shook.

"Yeah," she said. "I went off."

Hinata sat down beside her, and folded her hands in her lap. "Then maybe you should go apologize?"

It was a question but it also wasn't. Sakura knew that sometimes her friend phrased things a certain way to get her to do a certain thing, or maybe to make her feel guilty—which was a uniquely Hinata type of thing, because at least Karin had the sense to know that Sakura felt guilty for almost nothing.

Except, apparently, yelling at her patient's fathers.

She crossed her arms on the table and dug her face into them, grumbling about ungrateful patients and ungrateful friends and how it was _so unfair_ —but sometimes being in the wrong was easy, and Sakura had never been the type to want to stay wrong.

And Hinata always made a sick sort of sense.

Sakura pushed back from the table with a huff, pink hair in her eyes. She brushed it away, impatient—it was too long, and past crushes on beautiful boys who might or might not have liked long hair were not things to dwell on. She wasn't a little girl (well, maybe a little, but she wasn't dying and that was saying something because _everyone_ was dying), and she could do this.

Hinata smiled at her, really smiled, on her way out.

Sakura had the distinct impression that she'd just been played.

The walk back to the room 2021 wasn't as long as Sakura would have liked. She touched the door, stopping abruptly, wondering if maybe she shouldn't just leave.

It would be easier.

Easier wouldn't help the feeling in her gut heavy like lead. She knew that. And so she pushed through, and opened her mouth to apologize as fast as she could—

And found a little girl alone.

Laboured breathing and eyelids drooping, she perked up at the sound of the door sliding open.

"Papa?" she asked.

"No, honey. It's the nurse," Sakura murmured, dropping back into the caregiver-protector woman she knew the best—that woman wasn't cruel, and didn't say things to hurt just because she could. She sat down next to the little girl, and the seat was cold beneath her.

(He'd been gone for as long as she had been. The dislike was palpable on her tongue.)

"Papa said he would come back… but maybe not…" Midori murmured.

"He'll be back," Sakura assured her.

"Mama said that, too."

Resentment.

Sakura knew that feeling well; it came off the girl in waves and though her she sounded weak, her eyes were sharp and dark grey and so very, very young. And it was thick and potent and toxic, and Sakura wondered when the world had got so old and so ill that a seven-year-old could see it.

"Where is your mama?"

The girl shrugged too-thin shoulders, her collarbones poking out through the pale blue fabric at sharp jutting angles that made Sakura wince and look away. No child should be like this, and it killed her—why was trying to do this, again?

"I don't have a mama anymore," she said.

"Oh," Sakura said.

"Can you read?"

"Yes."

"To me?"

Sakura nodded. "What do you want to hear?"

There was a pile of books tucked under the night table—all old fairy tales, writ in another time when the world was a little bit cleaner. The girl pointed at the one with a cracked blue spine and aged yellow pages; hungry-eyed and wanting.

"That one," she said.

Sakura smiled a little at the loopy title. _The Little Mermaid_.

"This doesn't have a happy ending. Are you sure?"

The little girl set her jaw and stared stubbornly at the ceiling. "I don't really like happy endings."

And that was that.

Sakura opened the book, and began to read.

/ / /

Half an hour later, the sound of the door sliding closed startled her. Sakura, completely engrossed in the tale, blinked up and found that not only was her charge asleep, but that her charge's father was standing in the doorway, looking something like horrified.

(Or maybe just annoyed—Sakura had a sneaking suspicion they probably looked the same.)

"Hello," Sakura said mildly.

He said nothing, frozen in place as he stared at her.

"What, haven't you ever seen a nurse before?" she asked, suddenly impatient. She'd come to apologize, and the best he could do was gape at her like she was one of the junkies down by the tracks begging for change? No, absolutely not.

"How is she?"

So he was going to ignore her completely. Sakura supressed the urge to stick her tongue out at him—she wasn't twelve years old, and she'd dealt with more annoying people in her life. She was a _professional_. She'd thought she'd be past this already.

(He seemed to rub her the wrong way. It was probably the privilege; Sakura had known so many like him and _hated_ so many like him and—wait, she'd already had this conversation with herself. Deep breath, Sakura.)

Rude or not, it _was_ his daughter lying immobile in the stark white hospital sheets.

"The morphine kicked in ten minutes ago. She's not in any pain," Sakura murmured. She dropped her eyes and tugged at the frayed hem of her shirt. He probably wanted some privacy to collect himself—the muscle twitching in his jaw told her as much, and she kept her gaze down.

The twitch in her peripheral vision was movement as he strode away from the doorframe, a flash of dark clothing and pale skin in sharp contrast to the muted beige of the walls.

He reached down to touch the top of his daughter's head, achingly gentle.

"I'll just—" Sakura mumbled, and began to slip out of the chair.

"Don't," he said.

Sakura blinked at him. "Uh?"

"Do you want to get a coffee?"

—

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 _tbc_.


	4. rebounds in better clothes

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The coffee in the hospital cafeteria was awful.

All the staff knew it, and so, apparently, did Midori's father. Sakura stumbled out the door after him, still in her work scrubs and frazzled-haired, frazzled-eyed; still a little out of it from lack of sleep and lack of nutrients. She didn't know why she was following a strange man out to the coffee shop across the street on her break.

Actually, she was beginning to think she didn't know much of anything.

The sky was the colour of chlorinated water, bright-edged around the rim of the sky as though the whole world glowed as it closed in on them, and they crossed the street with a foot of space between them.

Sakura didn't trust him at all.

It wasn't until they were safely across the street and ensconced in leather chairs warm with weak sunlight that she forced herself to look at him. He sat rigid, and stared at a place left of her ear.

He wouldn't look her in her the eye.

Sakura sighed.

"What did you want to say?"

He glanced at her briefly, eyes gone dull and dead. "Pardon?"

She tucked ragged strands of her hair away, whirlybird cotton candy pink layered over darker fuchsia, moving little flutters like smoke in the lungs. And she looked at him with purple-bruise lines underneath her eyes like _I've been here before, I've heard this before; I know this shit, okay? I know. You can stop pretending_.

"People only do this when they have something to say. The coffee thing, I mean," she said. Her fingers glanced across the table, inking out designs invisible to everyone but her own self—she wrote out her name once, SA-KU-RA, and she hoped that maybe he would get it.

He didn't seem the type to miss things. But that meant very little in Sakura's world.

"So what do you want to say?"

There was a long moment of silence where they looked at each other, both measuring; but Sakura was so tired, and she didn't want to play this game. She clasped her hands until they were white-knuckled, and stared him down.

At last, he looked away.

The victory on her tongue tasted like ash.

"What do you want to drink?" he asked.

"Something warm," Sakura replied.

He nodded, and stood. Sakura dropped her head and looked at her hands, extricating them from each other. She'd pressed into her skin so hard there were white marks quickly flushing red as the blood rushed back into the veins, capillaries; her pulse slowly returned and she tried not to think of anything.

It was funny—she didn't even know his first name, and he came back with two cups of plain black coffee as a peace offering. She took it without thinking; chugged it back. It burned all the way down.

When she'd finally drained it, she allowed herself to look at him again. "So?"

"My daughter is dying," he said. The words were an exhalation of something that wasn't quite grief, but something deeper. Darker.

"Maybe we should start with names. I'm Sakura," she said, not unkindly.

"Uchiha Sasuke."

Well, that was something. She wondered what it cost him to be here—away from his dying child.

"Midori's mother is dead," he said.

She'd thought it might have been like that. She'd seen it before—children with fathers gone off to war and never come back, and children with mothers gone, and children with no parents at all. She'd seen the whole thing before, and it made her sick to her stomach.

"The fever?"

His jaw went tight, and his eyes went dead-cold. "No. Childbirth."

Sakura's chest ached.

They should have been _past_ that danger, by now.

But the sky reflected the earth reflected the people, and the acid rain ate through everything to leave nothing for the rest but pock-marked asphalt roads and worn-away street signs. Dead in childbirth was nothing—it was a cruel though, but the woman had escaped.

Sakura had wanted that, once, a long time ago.

"How long do you think my daughter has?"

The ice in his eyes had sunk into his voice, and it was all cool, calm professionalism. Like this didn't mean anything—and it didn't, not really, because she was just a nurse and she was twenty-two and she was weak, _weak_ when she shouldn't have been.

Sakura brushed her thumb around the rim of her cup, drawing on the last drops of caffeinated strength she had. "Not long. Three weeks, maybe. They'll ask you if you want an induced coma."

"Hn."

"It would give you more time," she murmured.

He looked up.

More time.

That was what everyone wanted. The hunger flashed against his face for a second—just a second, that was it, one single second in a world one single second was too much leeway to give. And then it faded, and his face was as cool and empty as a blank porcelain mask.

Sakura forced herself not to close her eyes.

(She would have killed for his composure.)

"What do I have to do?" he said.

" _Trust_ me."

/ / /

Sakura trudged home as the sun went down burning the sky teal-orange, fingers laced with nitroglycerin, and found Karin smoking on the fire escape. Her cousin blew grey smoke up and into the air to dissipate into nothing.

"Give me that," Sakura said, exasperated. "Those things are going to _kill_ you."

Karin let her pluck the butt from her fingers placidly. She threw her head back and laughed when Sakura put the thing to her mouth.

"You're so goddamn predictable," Karin chuckled. "Come inside. There's leftover pizza."

"You didn't eat it all?"

"I'm not _Miss Piggy_ , Sakura."

"Don't let _her_ hear you say that," Sakura replied as they climbed through the window. "She'll gut you."

"Ino wouldn't dare."

"If you say so."

Except that she probably would. Sakura oldest friend shat glitter and stabbed people with her stiletto on a good night, and death over a comment about her name was nothing short of usual.

Sakura followed the red flash of Karin's hair through the mess of their apartment, tottering between exhaustion and elation.

A night off. She had the night off.

Things could only get better from there.

The pizza was cold and the power had gone out. Sakura and Karin sat at the table, scuffing their feet along the linoleum, and didn't speak. One was getting ready to go and the other was getting ready to stay, but neither had the choice.

"Have you fallen in love yet?"

Sakura glanced up. Karin sat perfectly still, facing out towards the sun. The dripping heat curled the ends of her crimson hair and her glasses were slipping down her nose. The world turned indigo, and Sakura wondered how long any of them had.

"No."

"Do you think it matters?" Karin's lips barely moved.

For a long time, Sakura didn't reply.

And then:

"I don't think so."

"You're probably right. You wanna do something, tonight?"

It was casual, Sakura thought. A throw-away, even though Karin had never been the type for throw-aways. This was all or nothing, and the offer had been made: it would not be rescinded. "I'm exhausted."

"I don't care. We're all going dancing. You should come."

"Maybe," Sakura said. She'd never even stood a chance.

Karin's smile was a like a razorblade. She tipped her head back, and lit another cigarette.

—

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 _tbc_.


	5. dying at the pivot point

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Sakura had never been very good at letting go.

Karin poured alcohol down her throat and the world was a flash of colour and shadow, music shivering up her arms more feeling than sound and this—this couldn't be healthy.

The world tilted crazily, and Sakura thought she was going to be sick.

Instead, she tumbled to the floor, a ball of pent-up nerves and laughter. Karin's friends laughed with her—at her—because _you are such a lightweight, Sakura, what the fuck ever are we going to do with you_?

"Karin," she slurred, "Karin, my head hurts'n I wanna go _home_ , I gotta _work_ in the m'rning, an'…"

The lights swirled, and Sakura wondered if sometimes she tried too hard—fought too hard, studied too much, seeking and seeking and seeking acceptance. And it hurt, it hurt with every heartbeat—

And this, _this_ was why she didn't let herself lose control.

Everything got all… _fuzzy_.

She stumbled straight into the wall, and anchored herself there. Two palms against cool plaster, feet planted on the ground, and her forehead pressed against the solid surface to give herself some breathing room. She needed to be attached to the world at enough points that she didn't float away.

"You okay?" Karin's voice came from very far away, filtering through the cottony buzz in Sakura's ears.

She slid to the ground. The floor was sticky underneath her fingers, nail polish chipped and emerald green in the strobe. "Mm'hmm. I'm… sleepy. M'gonna go home… Gotta work…"

"Not alone, you don't."

"M'hmmm…"

"Sakura—just stay here, okay, I gotta make a call—"

"S'sticky here, Karin, I don' like it…"

"Just stay put," and Karin whirled. Sakura tracked her hair for only a minute, eyes flickering on the shining red, before she couldn't hold the concentration anymore and had to look away. She swayed to the side, tipping slowly and the ground rushed up towards her.

She caught herself, fingers scrabbling in the dirt, and forced herself to stand. Sakura's gaze was unfocused. Her hips swayed and she moved to the beat underneath her feet across the floor. She needed to find Karin—

But the night outside found her first, and Sakura got lost.

Konoha's backstreets were a maze. She slid through them like slick oil, jumping from puddle of light to puddle of light and clinging to the streetlight poles to keep herself upright.

The night was very quiet around her.

She traced the path to the hospital—because it was the one place she knew the best, the only place she knew the best. The hospital was a safe place, cool and calm when the rest of the world was under fire and acid rain. Sakura knew the hospital. Sakura _trusted_ the hospital. The hospital was closer than home—there was a bed at the hospital.

Sakura could sleep it off.

She trundled along, all loose-limbed grace in the way of a drunk, and didn't even realize she'd bumped into someone until after she'd hit the ground. The stars scattered, and she blinked upwards.

"Um, hi?"

There was a grouchy exhalation, and Sakura almost grasped at recognition. It hadn't been so long ago—

"Get up," he said—must have been a he; that voice was deep and slow and uncannily familiar—and hands curled around her wrists, jerked upwards. Fear gripped at her throat, and hey, Karin had been right, she was always getting into trouble—

"Haruno, what are you doing?"

"I—do I know you?"

 _Another grumpy exhale_.

Sakura giggled.

The hospital glowed a neon beacon in the night, but the hands that curled around her were infinitely gentle. Gentle as she was with the little ones, the dying ones, and oh god, she was not going to hold it together.

"There's this little girl inside," she mumbled. "Can't 'member her last name. She's… young. And she's gonna die. This is—everything is Karin's fault, 'm never letting her talk me into this again—"

"Be quiet."

"You're ugly. _You_ be quiet," she told him easily. The swill around her shoes ran red with the light off the ER sign and could have been fresh blood right out of someone's arteries, and all Sakura could remember was _a hospital is just a butcher for people_. She'd read that, once.

"I am quiet."

"Are not."

"Hn."

The hospital doors slid open. Sakura stumbled in after him, and the fluorescent lights were hard against her eyes. She waved vaguely at the nurse on night-duty, her knuckles crackling away like radio static. Maybe they'd think she was coming in early, or maybe late—Sakura couldn't tell the time.

She stared at the dark-clothed back, squinting.

Sobriety came the same way a person falls asleep—slowly at first, and then all at once. Worse than a symphony crescendo and more painful, coherency returned, and Sakura turned faintly green.

"I think I'm gonna be sick."

She was lucky that there was a trashcan not two steps away—Sakura had been on cleaning duty before, and she knew how much it _sucked_ to have to clean up vomit. She retched quietly, heaving and clammy-pale as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

"Sorry," she said.

"Hn."

An aching silence fell around them, cold in the fingers and the thighs. Sakura tucked her arms around herself until she was all knees and elbows, jerky angles, sharp planes that shouldn't have existed.

Sasuke didn't seem to notice.

"People probably tell you you're a magnificent asshole a lot, don't they?" she mused.

He didn't even say anything, and Sakura winced.

But she didn't apologize, so that was something. The hospital's hallways were not forgiving in their silence, the echo of shoes against tile the only sound. Sakura stopped outside of his daughter's room, reeling backwards just before he pushed open the door.

"You really love her, don't you." It wasn't a question.

Sasuke closed his eyes for the briefest second to mask an insurmountable pain. "Yes."

Sakura nodded, more to herself than to him. It was confirmation of something, though she wasn't sure just quite what. "I thought so. I, um, I'll leave you alone now. I'm going to… sleep, I guess. Thanks."

He inclined his head, hovering there in the doorjamb awkwardly for a moment. There was something oddly gratifying about it—she'd set him on edge, and probably no one else had ever. A strange dark feeling welled up, and Sakura smiled.

He blinked at her once, only once, and closed the door behind him.

She stood a frozen deer in the headlights, unable to comprehend what was going on. What was this blood-splatter sensation across the back of her eyelids where the demons from long ago ate what little was left of her sanity? What was this— _trust_? No, trust did not feel so dirty. It was something else.

Sakura told herself over and over that she was not running as she turned from the hospital's empty blank stare, and fled into the night.

—

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 _tbc_.


	6. the sun burns the shadows out

—

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"You _idiot_."

"Hi, Karin."

"I told you to _stay put_."

"I know."

"You—ugh. Get up here."

The door buzzed loud in her ears, and Sakura pulled open the grate across the door with a sigh, the metal cold and unforgiving beneath her fingers. She should have expected this, really, should have expected Karin's rage.

But she was feeling like someone's old throwaways, and she didn't have the energy to fight about it.

The elevator door closed behind her, boxing her in tarnished once-stainless steel where the water stains crawled down the walls in dark brown streaks of impossible rust. Her hair was a washed-out pink sheen in the distorted reflection off the wall, fading in and out, and Sakura sighed.

Things were only going to get worse from there.

Karin leaned against the doorjamb with her arms crossed over her chest in the threshold. She was in dirty pyjamas, old and ratty, and it wasn't like her at all. Her glasses were about to drop off her nose, and the frown could have been more disapproving if she'd tried.

"Good to see you're still alive," she glowered, and Sakura winced.

(She was doing a lot of that, tonight.)

"You're lucky I didn't call your mom."

"You wouldn't have."

"I would have," Karin replied. "I haven't had a cigarette in a goddamn week, and you _ran off_? Are you fucking kidding me? You _know_ what it's like out there."

"I work the hospital, Karin."

"Then I think you might a little more _careful_."

" _You_ aren't!" Sakura said through her teeth. Fighting with Karin always put her on edge, because Karin had learned a long time ago to shred a heart into pieces with words the same way Sakura had learned to slice muscle cleanly in two with a scalpel.

For a very long second, Karin looked like she was on the verge of losing it and tearing into Sakura, but restrained herself at the last moment. She sighed, long and slow and deep, and suddenly she looked less like over-protective parent and more like tired, sad, worried best friend.

"Whatever. Get inside," she mumbled, and pushed her glasses up her nose.

"Karin—" Sakura floundered.

"You owe me a bottle of vodka. And you're not allowed to bitch at me for smoking in the house," Karin replied, and wouldn't raise her eyes.

Sakura thought she saw the twitching of lips that always preceded Karin's more ludicrous demands. "For how _long?_!"

"A month."

"Two days!"

"Two weeks."

" _Five_ days, those things stink up the place and they're just _gross_ , I don't even know how you _smoke_ them—"

Karin rolled her eyes towards the stuccoed ceiling. "Fine, a week without the bitching and a two-six of Stoli. Take it or leave it."

"Done."

The disease between them shifted, lightened, and it was inexplicably easier to slip inside and close the door. It felt like relief, and it was in Karin's shit-eating grin that Sakura realized that she might not have even been angry in the first place.

The haunted glint in her eyes, though, told a different story entirely.

"So where'd you end up, anyway?"

"The hospital."

It was really surprise to either of them. They sat down at the pockmarked kitchen table on forever-rickety chairs, and Karin shoved a cup of coffee between Sakura's hands. It was cold and sludgy-thin— _how long you been sitting here, Karin_?—but she drank the whole thing down in one go. Something like an apology, she figured, but she couldn't help making a face.

"That's disgusting, Karin. How do you even drink that?"

"The same way I smoke," Karin said. She turned her cup round and round in her hands, obsessive-like, and Sakura knew it would be only seconds before the lighter came out.

"You're not even going to ask?"

Karin smiled, and the cigarette burned red as she lit up. With relish, she said "I have a week with no bitching, remember?"

Sakura would have laughed if she hadn't been so tired. She dropped her wide forehead down to the table, _clonking_ loud and painful, and didn't get so much as a sympathetic pat on the back. "We need to get out of here."

"One day," Karin murmured. She turned the cup in dizzying circles, back and forth the catch the single light and refract it against the walls. "Everyone needs to get out of Konoha."

"That's true."

In the choice between materialism and altruism (or maybe it was materialism and self-preservation—in Konoha, they were almost the same thing), materialism always won out. Humanity was a forgotten thing, lost as easily as Sakura had left her childhood nightmares for the hospital's blood-gutters, but at least there had been some _sense_ in that.

The acid rain ate through everything, but most especially logic.

"I bumped into—his name is Sasuke, apparently, and he's a father to a dying girl and he loved this dead woman. Actually, he might still love her. He brought me to the hospital because I was fall-down-drunk—you know how I get—and I—I like him and I don't even know why, and Karin, Karin, why is it always like this?"

"Sakura, you're babbling," Karin said, and examined her nails.

"What do I _do_?"

And finally, Karin did look up, eyes blazing with hard-edged pain and maybe just the littlest bit of cynicism. "The world moves on, Sakura. People die. It happens _every day_ —oh my god, I should _not_ have to tell _you_ this, of all people. People die and it's hard and it's sad but being alone is worse."

She paused and her glasses slipped down her nose as she ducked her head, crimson hair shadowing her eyes. "Being alone is always worse."

"…You still miss him, don't you," Sakura mumbled.

Karin shrugged. "Yeah, I guess."

"But you're sure being alone is worse?" Sakura asked. The loneliness shook in her fingers, and even though Karin was right there, it didn't make up for the aching emptiness in her stomach.

"Being alone is always, _always_ worse. And his—Sasuke?—his daughter is dying. That's gotta be the goddamn shits."

"It is. I think."

The _cree-ee-eak_ of wood against linoleum as Karin tilted back on her chair was a louder echo in Sakura's ears than the wail of the siren just beyond the window. They waited for it to pass.

"Someone's dying right now, you know? And that won't change, even if you want it to. What are you even waiting for?"

"The right time?" but the excuse sounded worn to Sakura's ears even as she spoke the words.

"It's never the right time."

The ocean dried itself on Sakura's tongue, and she thought— _yes, you're right, it's never the right time but all I can do is laugh and play with kids because I can't stop anyone from dying, I never learned how, teach me how, please, please, teach me how to make it better_ —

"You're right," Sakura said on the exhale, just the barest breath of acknowledgement.

"Hah!" Karin scoffed and threw her hair over her shoulder in one long wave of crimson. "Of course I'm right. I'm always right. Now, skedaddle."

"You're already kicking me out?" Sakura laughed because the very idea was absurd, and she was getting to that point in exhaustion where the body gives in to tremors and sporadic giggling, green eyes wide and getting wider by the second.

"Obviously," her cousin smirked. "You have to go get me my Stoli."

"You are a _horrible_ cousin," Sakura told her. She probably should have been offended, but mostly she was just too tired.

"Get _gone_ , already, Haruno! Or I'll go take him myself."

"You don't even _know_ him—"

" _Go_ , already!"

That was how Sakura found herself staring at the locked door of her apartment in the middle of the night with her work bag and her rain gear shoved into her hands, absolutely disoriented. She huffed, and blew strands of her hair out of her face.

There was nothing for it.

The hospital was simply the last vestige of sanity Sakura had left.

She might as well make the best of it.

—

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 _tbc_.


	7. you and life remain beautiful

—

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"You know what's messed up?"

"Hn?"

"I'm not on duty. I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not supposed to care—that was the first thing they told us, to care but not to get emotionally invested because that would only end up hurting us. They didn't want us to burn out. So they told us not to care."

"Really."

"Really," she said.

She waited next to him in the ER waiting room, the sky outside gone grey and misty-pale in the time before the sun rose. Sakura sat with her legs crossed, and listened to the artificial whirring of the ceiling fan above her. She didn't look at him. She didn't need to. She tipped her head back, and liked the feeling of her hair against her collar bone.

"But I do care," she continued. "I care way too much, which is why I'm sitting here with you instead of being curled up in my bed with a cup of cocoa."

"You don't have to be here."

"My cousin also kicked me out."

"Ah," he snorted.

She thought he almost smiled. But Sakura had a feeling that this man didn't smile very often—and especially not with nurses he didn't really know at all beyond half-carrying them drunk into the hospital where his daughter was dying.

(That sounded way worse than it actually was.)

She shifted a little bit, a nervous side-to-side movement in the shoulders. What she was about to say could go very badly—but then, Sakura had never really been one for deterrents. "What was she like?"

"Hn?"

"Your wife."

There was a long, pained silence. Sakura dropped her head and winced (but she was doing a lot of that these days, wasn't she). "Too soon?"

"No," he muttered, but it came out more like a sigh. "You know that she's…"

"Gone. Midori said," and tipped her head towards him, unspoken apologies in her eyes. _I'm sorry you lost her. I'm so, so sorry you're going to lose someone else, too_.

He wouldn't meet her gaze. He stared at the tiled floor, even as she watched shutters close somewhere behind his eyes—it was carefully masked hurt, and Sakura had known from the start that he was more messed up than she was (and that was saying something).

"She was the most rebellious girl I ever met," he said. Sakura caught the nostalgia and knew he was somewhere far in the past where she couldn't reach him.

"Kin. I was ten. She crashed into my bedroom and broke my lamp. I couldn't stand her."

Like it was the easiest thing. The words spilled over, spilled under, spilled out like falling asleep to late-night television after one-two-many microwave dinners. Sakura thought of Karin's cigarettes, red lipstick smudged around the filter, burned down to nothing. She sat and listened while he talked.

He talked for a very long time.

They were both washed out, pale imitations of themselves in sunlight like ghosts on the boardwalk. They floated there, in that moment that wasn't quite real like—time out of time, it was somewhere else, and Sakura listened to him murmur.

It was soft and slow, about his best friend, his older brother, his sickly mother; an overbearing father and a company that continued to eat the little bit of soul he had left. About a cocky girl and a cocky boy in the recline of car seats late at night when no one else was around and how she'd dumped cold coffee all over his head. How it hadn't even really been love, just mutual hatred of the world.

He told her secret things that he'd never even admitted to himself.

Growing up in Konoha was not kind to anyone.

Sakura was falling a thousand feet per second, and she didn't even realize it.

"Your turn."

"That might take a while."

"Everything takes a while, Sakura."

She blinked at him. "You called me Sakura."

"That's your name, isn't it?"

And it was that, more than anything else he'd said, that had her dropping her guard and letting the words out.

She explained about her parents—"Dad's a drunk and my mom loved him too much to leave"—and about the tiny apartment she'd grown up in with the TV blaring at all hours of the night. How she'd studied to escape. How there wasn't always enough money to keep everyone fed, much less afford to send her to school. About her cousin, and her cousin's inability to take anything seriously at all.

She told him stupid things that she'd never voice aloud before.

Sasuke sat next to her and listened, and didn't say a word.

When she finally ran out of things to tell him, Sakura thought that maybe something had changed. The sun was brilliant in the waiting room, bright white and clean when it shimmered down her arms. The sun didn't come out often, like this.

Sasuke seemed to think so, too.

He reached out, and took her hand.

/ / /

"There's a good chance she'll wake up," Sakura murmured. "She's fighting. Winning, even."

"They didn't think she would."

"No," she agreed. "They didn't."

They stood very close together outside of the little girl's darkened ICU room, watching as the machines glowed green and red and beeped her valiant little heart rate like _I think I can, I think I can_. It was just that Midori was so small, fragile as ice that formed over puddles, the kind that crunched merrily beneath a person's shoes.

And she was all that he had left.

"…Sasuke, do you think we can do this?"

(Well, not all.)

He a shot a glance down at their entwined hands—two hands with fingers locked, it was simple, really. There were beginnings there, hid in flesh and skin and the creases that both their lives had wrought. And they were just two people who had lived two separate lives that had somehow ended up tangled together over a dying little girl.

They were just two people, and maybe they had a chance.

"Yeah," he said, at last. "I think we can."

—

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 _fin_.


End file.
